The word metaverse has been stretched, twisted, and reshaped to suit everything from corporate ambitions to speculative crypto projects. But strip away the marketing noise, and you’re left with one fundamental question: where are people actually spending time in VR?
For many, the answer is simple—and it’s been the same for years: VRChat.
A Community-Driven Giant
Launched in 2014 and catapulted into prominence by 2017, VRChat was never built around a centralised vision of what a “metaverse” should be. Instead, it offered a toolkit—and let users define the space for themselves. That open framework has proven incredibly sticky.
Today, VRChat is not only a mainstay on PC VR and Meta Quest, but it’s also one of the few social VR platforms with a consistently high user base. According to public Steam data, it regularly exceeds 40,000 concurrent players—a figure that places it far ahead of competitors like Meta’s Horizon Worlds, Rec Room, and others in the “social VR” space.
But numbers alone aren’t the full story. What makes VRChat dominant is depth of engagement. This isn’t just a place people visit. It’s where they live online—hosting events, forming communities, building worlds, and investing hours that rival traditional MMOs.
What Makes It Work?
🛠 User-Generated Everything
The strength of VRChat lies in its architecture. Unlike closed platforms that dictate environments or enforce strict rulesets, VRChat gives users the tools to create—and then gets out of the way.
This has enabled:
- A library of tens of thousands of unique worlds
- Custom avatars that range from the artistic to the absurd
- Events like music festivals, talk shows, roleplay series, and even weddings
No other platform offers this level of sandbox freedom combined with persistent social structure.
🧠 Identity and Expression
VRChat’s avatar system—often underestimated in mainstream coverage—is core to its appeal. Users aren’t limited to stock models; they can import, customise, and swap avatars at will. That flexibility fuels a kind of personal expression and identity experimentation that other platforms, bound by tighter commercial frameworks, simply can’t match.
In a metaverse that claims to be about “presence,” feeling like yourself matters.
The (Lack of) Real Competition
Meta’s Horizon Worlds was supposed to be the flagship of its metaverse ambition. But as of early 2025, the platform has failed to maintain meaningful traction—hampered by limited creation tools, poor onboarding, and a shallow content ecosystem.
Other players like Rec Room offer strong casual engagement, particularly among younger audiences, but lean more towards gamified content than immersive social presence.
Meanwhile, Neos VR and ChilloutVR remain niche, with steeper learning curves and far smaller communities. They are technically impressive but lack VRChat’s cultural momentum and user-generated critical mass.
In short: nobody else is operating at VRChat’s scale or depth in the social VR space.
Caveats & Challenges
VRChat isn’t perfect. It has long battled moderation challenges, including disruptive behaviour, underage users, and controversial content. Its reliance on user-generated material makes uniform safety protocols difficult to enforce.
Its UI/UX still leans toward the enthusiast crowd—less intuitive for newcomers than corporate-polished rivals.
And while its peak user numbers are impressive for VR, they remain modest in comparison to flat-screen platforms like Roblox or Fortnite, both of which are expanding their presence in the so-called “metaverse” space (though not in VR).
So—Is VRChat the Dominant Metaverse?
In the context of VR? Yes. Unequivocally.
VRChat has established itself as the platform where social presence, creativity, and immersion converge. It didn’t win by promising a digital utopia or pitching to enterprise. It won by building something people actually use—and then giving them the freedom to shape it.
The metaverse isn’t coming. In VRChat, it’s already here. It just doesn’t look like Silicon Valley expected it to.
For ongoing coverage of the real VR ecosystem—beyond the buzzwords—stay with VR Related.
